There is no doubt that the 2022 World Cup was bought, and now football's
governing body must act or face humiliation

the sporting world appears to be engaged in the ultimate self-destructive competition: to see which activity might be crowned the undisputed champion of sleaze.

Match-fixing abounds in cricket and football. In athletics and cycling drugs continue to challenge assumptions. In racing even the horses are being doped.

But nowhere is the sense of decadence more depressingly apparent than in the organisation of the world’s greatest sporting tournament.

Back in December 2010, we all knew there was something dodgy going on when the Fifa president Sepp Blatter announced that the 2022 World Cup was to be staged in Qatar. A country constructed on sand, smaller than Yorkshire, with no footballing history, where summer temperatures top 120F (50C), it made absolutely no sense to gift it the competition. Frankly, there would have been more logic in holding football’s grandest tournament in Greenland in January.

There had to be an explanation for the decision, one that Blatter himself described recently as “a mistake”. Which means the latest revelations this weekend about widespread venality among the men who made it will have come as little surprise.

After The Daily Telegraph’s exposure of illicit payments and underhand accounting involving the former Fifa Vice-President Jack Warner, the email trail of corruption leaked to The Sunday Times is but confirmation of what we have all long suspected.

The 2022 World Cup was bought. Of this there can now be no doubt.

Naturally Qatar is anxious to distance itself from such accusations. It insists that Mohamed Bin Hammam – the man who is said to have been at the heart of the wholesale purchase – was not working for the official bid committee. Although oddly, as he flew around the world bestowing bounty from secret bank accounts, he did so in a private jet lent by the Qatari royal family.

But whether he was working directly, or indirectly, we can now be certain that his financially targeted lobbying paid off.

And this despite everything. Despite temperatures so extreme the competition will have to be moved to the winter if the participants are not to be barbecued on the pitch; this despite the bid breaking Fifa’s own rule about only having three of the required eight venues in a bidding country’s capital city all eight stadiums are being constructed within a 12-mile radius of Doha; this despite Qatar’s bid being described as “high risk” by Fifa’s own inspection committee. None of that matters when dollars are being bundled into brown envelopes.

It is now surely impossible for the Qatar tournament to go ahead. Never mind that stadium construction is already under way (taking in the process the lives of some 964 immigrant workers), never mind that through its ownership of Paris St Germain the Qatari royal family has the ear of football’s leading international bureaucrats — such as the Uefa president Michel Platini — never mind that the bid team can pay for the finest legal minds around, the competition simply cannot be staged there. If it goes ahead, no one will ever be able to trust anything Fifa does ever again.

There are still eight years to go. That represents more than enough time to reorganise, to find a more suitable place to stage sport’s most glittering product.

That won’t take long: anywhere beyond Antarctica is more suitable. Hold it in the USA, which bid against Qatar. Or better still, let it take place in Australia, a sports-mad society where, unlike Qatar, gay fans will be welcomed and women supporters will not be obliged to cover their heads.

If Fifa wants a smokescreen for such a decision, use health and safety. But the organisation has to do something. Nothing less than the very future of sporting integrity is at stake.